Origin Witch - Four Bosses, One Plan

Four markers glowed on the private channel—four men who each thought they owned a slice of Sector 666.

Corinne didn’t look up from the dark oak desk. She kept her weight off her legs on the Zephyr Float and scraped a thumbnail at the grease stain beside the display glass.

She reached out, tapped the small screen on the Magic Desk, and opened a four-way private conference channel, a premium feature Jasper Finch had unlocked using twenty refined copper ingots. Four distinct feeds flared to life above the timber desk. Corinne leaned her chest against its edge, dark eyes sweeping the three projections.

Upper left: Jasper Finch, in his Tier-3 stone hideout by the eastern quarry, sitting behind a polished pine desk that looked absurdly neat given the mud outside. His dark wool jacket hung over the chair, sleeves rolled to the elbows, pale forearms stained with blue ink. Gold-rimmed glasses clean, reflecting the amber of a brass lantern.

Upper right: Garrett Thorne, on a crate in his ridge fortress, broad chest unarmored, a thick maze of pale scars across his collarbones. He dragged an iron whetstone along a five-foot storm-blade with a rhythmic shhh-shhh.

Lower right: Piper Bell, in her log cabin kitchen, face flushed red from the heat of two massive iron cauldrons bubbling behind her. A cloud of thick garlic-scented steam kept crossing her face and she kept waving it away with the back of one flour-dusted wrist. Clean cotton apron, dark hair pinned with a wooden twig, heavy iron ladle in hand.

Lower left: Corinne herself, pale, soot-stained, dark linen tunic, black frames on her nose.

“Marnell doesn’t get a seat at this table,” Jasper said, nudging his spectacles with a pale middle finger. “He’s a local manager. Runs the southern ford checkpoints, collects iron scrap from the mud. He reports to me, and through me, to the supply line. He doesn’t need the boardroom.”

“Can we make this quick?” Piper asked, voice muffled as she lifted a cauldron lid to check the broth. “I have forty pounds of river trout coming from the basket traps in twenty minutes. If the Yellow-Tail petals aren’t in before the water boils, the mana regen drops ten percent.”

Corinne scanned the projections. “Sector 666 has three thousand one hundred people left. The Ether Tide is over. Weak shelters are gone. Sun-Tae’s fortress is rubble. Every survivor in those woods is armed, desperate, or hoarding materials they don’t know how to use.”

“Most are starving,” Piper added, wiping her brow. “Public market has zero bread. People trade iron picks for three dried potatoes.”

“Starving people are unpredictable,” Jasper said, pulling a leather ledger over with a dry flick of his wrist. “They form mobs. Try to burn storage huts. In the last six hours my southern scouts reported four attempts to breach our secondary timber warehouses. Marnell’s boys broke six arms to keep the perimeter clear.”

“Then break twelve,” Garrett said flatly. “They come near the ridge, my war-band uses wind-blades, not iron pipes.”

“That’s a short-term fix for a long-term logistics problem, Thorne,” Jasper replied, his voice dropping into the crisp corporate cadence he used around numbers. “Violence consumes resources. Every iron bolt Elodie fires costs three copper ingots. Every man on guard duty is a man not digging obsidian or cutting hardwood in the deep canopy. We need a stable trade architecture.”

“Which is why we’re here,” Corinne said.

She tapped her spectacles, sending a document manifest to all three screens. Header: The Canopy Syndicate Agreement.

“Four pillars,” Corinne stated, thumb tapping the desk in a slow rhythm. “Not a gang. Not a protection racket. A closed-loop cartel.”

Jasper leaned toward his screen, gold-rimmed glasses reflecting the text. “Go on.”

“Pillar One: Alchemy and Magic. The Spire holds total monopoly on high-tier brewing. Health, mana, anti-fire elixirs, slowness charges, explosive ordnance. No independent crafter in Sector 666 gets Anseic water or high-purity arrays without my stamp. I set the sector price floors. No discounts, no charity.”

“Pillar Two: Information and Logistics,” she said, looking at Jasper. “Finch controls the exchange desk, the empty-glass recycling, the intelligence network, raw ore procurement. You handle black-market pricing, filter scammers, take ten percent on all distribution.”

Jasper’s thin lips curved into a sharp smile. “Ten is light for an exclusive clearinghouse, Corinne. I was thinking fifteen.”

“Ten,” Corinne said, voice dropping an octave, cold and unyielding. “Or I open my own trade desk on the first floor and hire Piper’s gatherers to run deliveries.”

Jasper held her gaze through the projection for two long seconds, his gold-rimmed glasses catching the amber light, then sighed and dipped his head once. “Ten percent. Continue. Though I’ll be revisiting this margin once the trout trade stabilizes.”

“Pillar Three: Enforcement and Defense. Thorne’s war-band becomes the official border patrol for Sector 666. You secure the southern ford, clear the Grade-D nests along the mud-swamps, protect Piper’s gatherers in the field. In exchange, fifty percent priority allocation on combat potions, plus exclusive rights to heavy armor drops.”

Garrett stopped his whetstone, set the five-foot blade across his knees, broad bearded face impassive. “What about the independent gangs? Jack’s boys still hold the western ridge. Twenty men with iron spears.”

“Jack’s boys don’t have health potions,” Corinne said flatly. “And Machinegun Jack blew his only handgun apart three days ago trying to shoot my bullets. If Jack doesn’t sign the Syndicate tariff by tomorrow noon, Finch stops selling his gatherers clean water. He’ll be out of wood in forty-eight hours.”

Garrett let out a short booming laugh that rattled his screen. “Cold, girl. Real cold. I like it. War-band signs.”

Corinne turned to the lower right screen.

“Pillar Four: Rations and Culinary Alchemy. Piper controls the food grid. All raw monster meat from Thorne’s team goes to Piper’s kitchen. She processes it into mana-regen stews, stamina bread, health soups. No raw meat on the open market. Want to eat, you buy from Piper’s store with wood, stone, or herbs.”

Piper blinked, honey-brown eyes darting between the three hardened faces. “I can’t cook for three thousand, Corinne. I only have six cauldrons.”

“You cook for three hundred who actually have materials to pay,” Corinne told her, raspy voice calm. “The rest eat boiled grass or dry roots until they find something useful to trade. Finch supplies four more iron pots and twenty gatherers to chop your firewood.”

Piper swallowed, looked at the steaming cauldron, then back. “Okay. But no earthworms in the public stew. Those are for your private batches.”

A faint flicker of dark humor touched Corinne’s mouth. “Agreed.”

Jasper tapped his quill. “Profit-sharing structure?”

“Fifty percent of all raw materials through the Syndicate tariff go to the Spire’s expansion fund,” Corinne said, laying her hand flat on the desktop. “Twenty to Thorne’s war-band for upkeep. Fifteen to Finch for logistics. Fifteen to Piper for kitchen and herbs.”

“And blacklists?” Jasper asked, eyes sharp behind his lenses. “When an outcast tries to bypass the Syndicate and sell raw ore straight to Sector 665?”

“There is no bypass,” Corinne said.

She reached out, tapped a command on her desk interface, and locked the Canopy Syndicate Pact into the sector’s private trade nodes.

“Anyone who sells raw materials outside without Finch’s clearance gets added to my store blacklist. No health. No mana. No fire protection. They can trade with outsiders using broken bones and empty spell bars.”

The three screens went quiet.

It wasn’t a noble alliance. It wasn’t a heroic coalition to save humanity from Kaelum. It was a cold, brutal, four-headed monopoly built to strip every scrap of value out of Sector 666 before the rest of the world noticed what they were sitting on.

Jasper raised his split of Anseic water toward his screen. “To the Canopy Syndicate. May our margins stay high and our suppliers stay desperate.”

Garrett picked up his whetstone. “To heavy steel and clean blades.”

Piper let out a small tired sigh, adjusting her twig pin. “To not starving in a wooden box.”

Corinne didn’t raise a glass. She closed the four-way window, letting the blue projections dissolve into pale ether specks that drifted onto the timber floor.

Steelwool hopped from the bookshelf down to the desk edge, metallic talons clicking, and shoved its spiky gray head against her elbow for a scratch. Corinne ran a rough thumb along the bird’s cold neck, then reached into her Pouch of Preservation and counted the row of round vials by feel: health, mana, the yellow corrosive decoctions. Each one accounted for. Each one priced.

She picked up her ledger pen and wrote the four signatures at the bottom of the agreement, then set the pen down. The terms were locked, the pillars stood, and every crate and core in the valley now answered to one tower. She leaned back against the balcony rail, the cool wind moving through the glass doors, and let the quiet of the first real plan she had ever built settle over her.

— Origin Witch —